


Child Ballads

by Geekhyena



Category: English and Scottish Popular Ballads - Francis James Child, October Daye Series - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Child Ballad: The Two Sisters, Didactic, Gen, Possession, Revenge, sororicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-18 16:36:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21730519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geekhyena/pseuds/Geekhyena
Summary: The Luidaeg tells a story...
Comments: 12
Kudos: 24
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Child Ballads

**Author's Note:**

  * For [republic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/republic/gifts).



> Thanks to Vae and ostentenacity for being awesome betas! We know one Child Ballad happened in Tobyverse, but what about another one of my favorites?

Come on in, sit down. Don’t look so surprised, I do clean when I feel like it. Not because of you, I felt like it. Just because you bring me donuts doesn’t mean I do anything unless I feel like it. That’s the problem with you and Toby - you’ve gotten too comfortable around me. You’re lucky I think you have a fair shot at being less of an asshole than most of your kind - that and if your First knew you were coming over for donuts and storytime, she’d be pissed. I admit the latter outweighs the former somedays, heh. 

Hand me one of those ones with the chocolate mints on top. And sit down for Dad’s sake. I said I was going to tell you a story, wasn’t I? The couch will not bite you. Probably.

They say it’s about two princesses now, but it wasn’t. It was about two Firstborn, back in the days when Titania’s get were slaughtering any of Maeve’s children they could find. The way they tell it now, the two sisters fought over a man, and maybe they did. Maybe that was all the excuse she needed. Maybe what they fought over was the right to exist, or maybe Titania’s daughter was more jealous than she was smart. Maybe she thought she could get away with it. But the fact of the matter is, there once were two sisters, and one slew the other, because she could.

Titania’s daughter’s name was Pannychis, mother of the Xana _._ You don’t see many of them around anymore, but in those days, humans that wandered into their wild parties at night would find themselves dancing until they dropped dead of exhaustion. Or led off the path and into something nasty. Maeve’s children may have loved the forests more, they were Ours, but that didn’t stop Titania’s from throwing a rager when they felt like it. And Pannychis was vain, as vain as any of Titania’s pretty spoiled brats, the ones who thought flower magic and beauty and everything shiny was supposed to be theirs. 

And then there was my sister, Uisce. She was mother of the Melusine - what, no, the story? That was about -a- Melusine. They mistook her name for what she was. Her actual name was Alpheusa, and she was the granddaughter of Uisce. I remember her - she fell in love with a mortal, and look what happened. No matter whose kid you are, there’s just some part of us that’s too fascinated by humans, and it rarely ends well. But we keep falling in love with humans, and we keep getting our hearts broken, and things keep getting fucked up, or fucked with, or just plain fucked. 

Anyways, where was I. Yes, Uisce. She was one of the prettiest of my sisters - Maeve’s children tended towards the feral and monstrous, like yours truly, but Uisce made it work. She had the prettiest dusting of scales, almost like the glitter sunscreen kids these days wear, or the UV glitter eyeshadow May's taken to wearing lately. A Tylwyth Teg changeling invented that sunscreen- brilliant marketing gimmick, hides the fact you’re wearing fairy ointment. But Uisce was lovely, and when she was out of the water, she danced around on two legs as pretty as you please, only her scales hinting that she was one of our Mom’s, someone born to zooming around the Undersea like the most elegant of monsters, like so many of us were. And I guess Pannychis got jealous. She always acted as if beautiful things belonged to her, that beautiful things were only for Titania’s get. How dare one of us be pretty, how dare one of us be prettier than her. 

Or maybe that was just the excuse. There was always an excuse in those days, when they hunted us down - we’d hurt them, we’d insulted them, we’d insulted the great bitch that is their mother, we’d stolen one of their descendants and didn’t we know blood mixing was a crime? That’s how we got the Rusalka, natch - the mother of the Nixies got a little frisky with a Merrow, and while the Merrow firstborn gave exactly zero shits about the whole thing, a bunch of Titania’s get got all riled up about the “stain upon their line” and it just added fuel to the fire. They hunted us is the point. They didn’t need a reason except “Mommy wants us to”.

So maybe it was personal. Maybe Pannychis was jealous of Uisce, maybe she wanted to please Mommy, maybe she just felt like it. And maybe Uisce was a little too sweet, maybe she was trying to carve out space for herself to be kind in a world where it was fucking hard to be kind, maybe she had too much of that wide-eyed optimism that got so many of her descendants in trouble. Maybe Pannychis was good enough at dizzying people that when she caught Uisce off guard, it was over faster than it should have been. She fought, our Uisce, she took strips out of that bitch’s hide, but the Firstborn heal fast, until they don’t. Until someone slits your throat with silver and iron, and dumps your corpse in a pond. Night-haunts don’t come for the First - even when we’re dead, the power in our flesh would overload them and they’d explode. Yes it happened before, once. No I don’t want to talk about it today. Today is about my sister.

I heard her screaming on the wind, and I saw her body in the hands of a Daoine Sidhe named Uidluias. When I saw him investigating her body, I admit it, I was pissed. I raged at him for desecrating my sister’s corpse, for daring to touch her, a child of Titania as he was. She. Was. My. Sister. She should have lived long and strong in the ponds and streams with her children, rather than have her corpse dumped into a pond like a bag of trash. I threatened to replace his lungs with snarling eels, to fill the ventricles of his heart with seawater, to drown him in the tears I shed for my sister, who had always tried to be kind, even when the world seemed determined to stamp it out of us. He was a child of Titania, I couldn’t touch him...until he touched my sister. I was allowed self-defense, and he had touched my sister’s corpse. There was enough wiggle room in my curse for me to have this bit of satisfaction, and once he realized just who had caught him, he started begging.

But Daoine Sidhe aren’t all bastards. My sister may have tried to stamp out all the decent ones, but she wasn’t always successful, you’re living proof of that. He wasn’t trying to desecrate the corpse. He was trying to fish it out of the pond. He was trying to be kind, and to find a way to lay her to rest in the sea. Not all Fae burn the bodies, Maeve’s children preferred the remnants of our previous existence to be returned to the sea - let the husk of what we were be rocked in the belly of a shark, back where we came from. He had been trying to do the right thing, and so I gave him a chance to do the right thing again. I made him a bargain.

Uidluias didn’t want power, he didn’t want a throne, he just wanted fame. He wanted to be the greatest bard in all Faerie. He was a good singer, and persuasion is flower magic. But I could give him the opportunity to be truly great, to be truly famous, and to be the instrument of my vengeance. By touching my sister’s corpse, he had committed an act against me. But now...now he had my permission. It’s amazing what a bloodworker and a determined sea witch can do. 

It took three months. One month to bathe her bones and hair in the light of the full moon, one month to make the harp, and one month again to soak in moonlight and in a mix of blood and herbs. I was no alchemist, but we both knew blood, and I knew it better than him. And Titania’s get were loath to kill each other at the time, it detracted from killing us. I knew this was my chance. 

Uisce made a beautiful harp - her bones formed the body, and her hair, that beautiful golden hair she shared with all her descendants, the hair that used to trail behind her as she swam, like a river of molten metal flowing underwater…..well, hair normally is shitty material for making a harp out of, but with what we did to it? It played like weeping, it played like yearning, it played as smooth and sorrowfully as enough to break your heart, and it sang. 

And so did she. Maybe I should have warned him about it, maybe he should have asked more questions. Maybe he should have thought about the magic contained in the flesh and bone of a First. Maybe he should have known that as he traveled far and wide with his famous harp and his lilting voice, that he should have asked a few more questions about the spells laid into it. He was good, but with the harp, with the bones of my sister in his hand? He was amazing. 

And so he gained fame, and he got all that he ever asked for until one day he was playing for the court of Oberon himself. And so was Pannychis, and so was I, and so were many of us, because the one place that was a truce in the fighting, the one place we couldn’t kill each other, was under his roof, or whatever roof he was staying under at the time. Whatever petty wars we had stopped in his presence, no matter where that was. Oberon's Law wasn't fully in place then, but that's where it started. He wanted to be able to spend time with his descendants without having to wade in to stop a bloodbath. 

I’d poured a lot of power into that harp, setting a spell that would wait for the right time. And when he’d finished a rolling ballad that had all cheering, he found he couldn’t stop. His fingers were stuck to the string, and the harp played him, and as it did, everyone heard the voice of Uisce, her sweet voice like water over sunny rocks, and she sang:

_“Farewell to the Lord my Father_

_Farewell to my Lady Mother_

_And woe to my Sister, who murdered me.”_

Pannychis didn’t die that night, but she didn’t last long after she left Oberon’s halls. There’s a reason you don’t see many of her descendants around. And Uidluias? Well, he did wind up famous - maybe not his name, but you’ve heard the story, right? I’d say that counts. 

Now hand me another donut, kid. Stories are hungry work.


End file.
